Contribute/Lifecycle

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Whether you've been building a community for a long time or you are just getting started, these pages will help you find the information you are looking for to build vibrant, supportive communities that will have impact on your project.

This document seeks to define the process by which a Mozilla team becomes a community contribution area. The process is broken down into phases which, in our experience, communities go through as they develop, and includes milestones and resources for growing and supporting Mozilla communities. We expect that each client group (team?) will come to us at different phases of the lifecycle. We will support each of them based our assessment of where in the lifecycle they are, and what structure and framework will help them reach the highest potential for contribution.

Each phase of the lifecycle is designed to meet the client at their point of need and to provide a framework on which they can build.

In the community building context, an “Activator” is a dedicated community building resource from the team. This person’s work shifts in each phase of the lifecycle.

Clients have volunteers involved in their project and they'd like to turn up the dial on participation. Teams in this stage, having a few core contributors and many active contributors, are ready to steward their communities through on-going, significant growth.

Teams have established ways to sustain momentum (mentoring new contributors, developing leadership, etc.) and have demonstrated a 10x increase in active contributors. [I really want something in here about measuring leadership.]

(This stage is the minimum target for all high leverage partnerships.)

It may be useful to provide more context around the stages of learning or to change the way we refer to them. Christie and I just had a review of the lifecycle with a team and they weren't sure where the language came from and I talked through the science behind it and linked to a reference doc. Some options could be to spell things out more inline -- such as including a sentence or two along with the name of the stage (eg, The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit). Another option could be to just link to the stage so people can get more details if they want -- in that case, maybe calling them stage 1, stage 2, etc would avoid people possibly getting distracted with current labels. -- David

I strongly recommend renaming this page. It is not a lifecycle, so the name is a misnomer. If it were a lifecycle, it would show the teams either "dying" or starting over. It is much closer to a process maturity model of volunteer contribution for staff teams. Rename to Contribute/Maturity_Model. Jswisher (talk) 14:16, 24 July 2014 (PDT)